How to Change Your Mindset

How to Change Your Mindset

A mindset is a group of thoughts, ideas, and beliefs; but at its core level, a mindset is a group of emotions because one emotion creates thousands of thoughts.

If you “get rid of” your lower emotions, you can literally get rid of thousands of negative thoughts about you, your abilities, and what you can accomplish in your life.

How do you get rid of fear, guilt, apathy, etc.?

There are a lot of ways. Here are some highly effective ones:

  1. Feel an emotion until it is done
  2. Embrace the opposite emotion
  3. Go into zero thought
  4. Mimic and be around greatness

Here is how to do each of these methods:

1. Feel an Emotion Until it is Done

It is a concept which is so simple, you would which they would teach it to every school aged child from preschool up. The ultimate guide to this idea can be found in the book “Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender,” by David R. Hawkins M.D. Ph.D.

The process is simple. No need to express the negative emotion through actions or words. Just sit down in a quiet space and feel the garbage emotion until it is no longer there. It will run out. Other layers of the same emotion might come up, but that layer of the emotion will be gone.

Authors Note: The fastest I have ever been able to change my life came immediately after listening to the audio-version of this book (available on Audible, which is an Amazon company.) I actually felt quite dumb after listening to this book because I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and what I didn’t know was so simple.  I didn’t know that negative emotions ran out, and underneath them is a peaceful feeling. I didn’t know there is a start, middle, and finish to an emotion, and if you don’t let an emotion finish it means you get to carry around with you until you reach a max amount of that emotion for which you can store before your brain will look for an excuse in your environment to at least let some of the emotion out. 

Once I started booking time in my day to sit down and feel my negative emotions until they ran dry, my life changed exponentially. Negative people moved away from me, and positive people came towards me – very weird and rewarding. I also became even more intuitive.

2. Embrace the Opposite Emotion

This is a yin yang type of approach to balance. Again, it is a simple process. If you feel fear, imagine you are a computer and download peace into yourself. By “downloading” or embracing the opposite emotion, you will pull yourself from one extreme into the balance of where you want to be. If you are playing sports you would want to have a peaceful mind, but not be so peaceful you could fall asleep.

Authors Note: I was once told the body works from top to bottom, then inside out – which makes logical sense to me, so I use this idea when I am mediating or embracing an emotion.  I imagine or visualize being a computer and “downloading” an emotion, starting at the top of my head and slowly pulling the emotion to my feet, and then pulling the emotion to my heart and radiating the emotion out of my body and filling up the space around me with the emotion. 
If you have a math, science, and logic type brain like me, you may want to adopt this idea as an experiment first. If it works for you, great. If it doesn’t work for you, great.  Having an experimental mindset is a great way to add affective tools to your tool box. If an idea doesn’t work, who cares, because you probably found 10 others which did work for you using this mindset.

3. Go into Zero Thought

All you have to do for this method is kick all thoughts out of your head, and you can actually get to the point of not even thinking about your breath, but instead observing feelings in your body or observing the people around you without thought.

The following paraphrased from the trust technique. https://trust-technique.com/

Say you were to measure the number of thoughts in your head from 1 – 10. 

7-10: would be over thinking levels (too many thoughts in your mind at one time)

4-6: would be optimal thinking levels (focused thoughts)

1-3: reduced thinking levels (very little to no thoughts in your mind)

When you are in a state of over thinking, you will notice you are experiencing lower range emotions like fear, and anger. When you are in the optimal level of thinking you are awake and alert in a positive way. And when you are in a state of reduced thinking, you will experience peaceful and enlightened emotions.

Authors Note: Zero thought is the craziest thing. If you slowly start reducing the thoughts in your head, watch what happens to the people or animals around you. THEY WILL GET QUIETER.
I was once in a crazy busy and loud hair salon.  My hair dressers said “I wish my colleagues would be quieter, I am sorry it is so loud in here.” I told him, “I can make that happen. Watch.” Slowly I kicked all the thoughts out of my head as I observed the energy in the room. Within two and a half minutes the room was almost 100% quiet with just the sounds from the radio and hardly anyone talking.  He asked me how on earth did I do that, and so I told him.   You can pull animals and other people into a sleeper state do this, it is a pretty incredible tool.
If you are wondering how to “go into zero thought” you are not alone. I have met some very intuitive people who have asked me how to do this, which is funny because zero thought is a basic form of mediation. All you do is slowly start reducing thoughts which come to your mind to nothing. If a thought pops in you throw the thought out. If you are still having a hard time going into zero thought, be around people who find it easy and you will find you will learn how to do it almost immediately.

It is neat, but I can actually do ALMOST zero thought in the background, while having a conversation with someone and reducing the energy and intensity of the conversation.

4. Mimic and Be Around Greatness

If you can be around a great person physically, do it.  But here is the kicker, do not be an energy sucker or they will kick you out of their space.  Great people give energy to other people. Here is an example of this: compare being at an amazing business conference live, vs. watching a live stream of the conference. There is a much different vibe from these two experiences, with the better experience of being there live.

Great people will fuel you with energy. People who are going through a tough time, or constant complainers will suck your energy dry. 

It doesn’t mean avoid people going through tough times, but it does mean you should honor their free will choice to stay this way if you try to help them and after a prolonged period, they chose not to help themselves.

Love can keep you stuck. If you love these people and want to be around them, show them how to help themselves so everyone can feel better. They say you are the average of the 5 people you hang around most…so this give you choices: improve your group, or find a new one.  Ultimately, if you decide to leave a group you may find the same type of people in the next one if you have the same emotions they have inside you but do not realize it.  Love can keep you stuck, but it can also rise everyone up.

 

By Nadine DeKoning.